The present invention relates generally to print and mailing services, and more particularly to methods and systems for processing multiple mailing services orders for printing and mailing varying quantities of different printed products with and to a variable list of addresses.
Many businesses have a need to mail out printed postcards or envelopes or other printed matter to a large list of different addresses. For example, advertising through the mail has been around for many decades. Some printing businesses offer a mailing service which allows a business or individual to provide a design to be printed on a postcard, brochure, or other addressable mail item, and then have the mailing services provider print a desired quantity of the addressable mail item, then print each card with respective different addresses supplied from a list of mailing addresses, apply postage, and deliver the printed addressed mail items to a shipping service for direct mailing to the addressees. In general, in the past, the specified quantity of mail items was first printed, and then the printed mail items were supplied to a separate addressing system which sequentially applied addresses from the mailing list onto the individual printed mail items.
For large quantities of the identical printed matter (i.e., the printed product without the address printed thereon), volume-based printing houses typically utilized industrial offset printers to print the unaddressed mail items. At large volume, the operations cost to print using offset printing presses was in the past significantly less than other printing options. However, the minimum quantity of mail items that needed to be printed before the printer started making a profit after considering setup, print and operations costs (i.e., the profit point) was fairly high, often a minimum of several hundreds of mail items. For this reason, mailing services companies typically fulfilled only large-volume orders.
With advancements in the technology and speed of industrial digital printing machines, digital printing has become a very viable option for printing mailing services print jobs. Digital printing systems, such as those based on inkjet or laseijet technologies, offer an advantage over offset printing in that digital printers are a “direct print” technology in contrast to the indirect printing process of offset technologies. That is, offset presses require an aluminum plate to be created for each of the colors (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta and Black, known as CMYK in the industry) used to print full-color images. Digital presses do not utilize aluminum plates and instead directly apply (via inkjet print heads) ink to the paper.
With these advances, mailing services providers can now print large volumes of print items using digital presses. However, to make mailing services orders a profitable business, mailing services companies still need to print large quantities of print items and to achieve high volume, print multiple print items on large single sheets, which are stacked and separated into individual printed items, typically by a laser cutter or guillotine cutter, after printing. This increases throughput capability and allows flexibility in the size(s) of the items to be printed.
In the past, individual mail item designs were assigned to different positions in a two-dimensional gang of print items, and the two-dimensional print gang was printed a number of times to produce a stack of identical gang sheets, each containing corresponding print items in corresponding positions on the printed gang sheet. The stack of printed sheets was then separated into individual stacks corresponding to different printed item positions in the gang (and often corresponding to different customer orders). To work efficiently, this methodology requires that the desired quantity of each of the individual print items placed into the different individual slots (or positions) of the gang is the same. In other words, a gang may include positions for eight different print items. Each position can be filled by a print item from a different order, where each order ideally specifies the same quantity of printed items. The gang can be printed a number of times (preferably equal to the specified quantity) to produce a stack of printed gang sheets. The stack can then be separated into individual stacks, each stack containing the specified quantity of the print item occupying the same position in the gang. To keep track of different customer orders, a customer order for a quantity of a particular mail item would be placed one or more positions in the gang, and the same gang sheet is printed multiple times and then separated into individual stacks. This methodology prevents multiple customer orders from being intermingled in any given stack. Thus, if a given stack is damaged or lost, that stack can be reprinted.
The above-described ganging methodology presupposes the aggregation of print orders of the same quantity or multiple thereof. Using this methodology, mailing services providers have two choices: require orders to be in predetermined quantities or multiples thereof (so the orders can occupy more than one slot in a gang), or allow some of the printed items to be wasted (on those orders that are not for one of the predetermined quantities or multiples thereof). This leads to waste and can cause delay in printing while waiting for sufficient numbers of orders of the predetermined quantity.
Accordingly, other ganging methodologies are desired that would allow mailing services orders of any quantity to be processed. It would also be desirable if such methodology allowed a simple reprinting methodology for reprinting individual stacks of print items.